


Unable to Move Forward (Stuck in the Past)

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 20th Century, Depression, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, New York, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Roman Catholicism, before/after
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 08:09:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13654968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: After the war that seemed to last a thousand years, Bucky Barnes just wants to remember.





	Unable to Move Forward (Stuck in the Past)

The first time Steve remembers being on his knees was in December of 1927. Some boy outside of mass had said that Joseph Rogers was a good for nothing loser who probably went straight to hell. Steve had spent over a half-an-hour praying for his father’s soul to go to heaven. He was sure Joseph went to heaven, but there was no shame in making sure.

It wasn’t until he had finished his prayer to St. Cecilia, halfway through his cheap beads that had once belonged to his father, that someone interrupted.

“What are you still doing here, boy?” “Boy” seemed to be tacked onto the end like some awkward afterthought. The nun looked modest in expression, but not unkind. 

Steve unlocked his hands and planted them in his pockets. She stood over him like a flock over prey. 

Steve puffed out his chest and refused to open his mouth. The nun had no patience left in her body for little boys and their little prayers.

The nun had waited for a few moments for a respectful response that she might have known would never come. Steve had the set of the shoulders of a boy with unabated pride, though his small face was an unflattering, splotchy red. 

“Off you go, boy. Don’t want your ma to get too worried.” And with a wave of her arm, she sent him off.

 

Rebecca Barnes was two years younger than Steve and had started school one year early. Because Steve had gotten a scary bout of Scarlet Fever the year before, he had to share a small classroom with one of three of the Barnes siblings.

She was cute in the way that little kids were, and with Steve being a whopping eleven he was done with the childishly full cheeks of the girls in his class. He never really talked to her in class, but the other boys sure did talk about her. 

They talked about her mom and the beauty that would surely be handed down to Rebecca. They talked about her perfect dresses and her shined shoes and her ability to write in a mint cursive. But most of all, they talked about Bucky Barnes, two years older and, apparently, already everyone’s best friend.

He had never heard the name prior to this year, but, all of a sudden, it seemed Bucky Barnes was the only name Steve heard. He appeared to be more popular than even Stanley Rodan, who had brushed Sidney Winnie’s breasts during a particularly intense game of tag. He had been a living legend ever since. 

Steve had been dragged into a harsh game of kick the can as he walked home from school. There were about seven boys surrounding a boy with a can of Maxwell House Coffee cradled in his arms. They were scruffy, a few in the grades above Steve. Two or three he didn’t recognize at all. 

“Come on, Steve! Just one game,” one of the boys in his grade yelled out to him. Steve paused but did not agree. 

“Yeah, Steve. They might needa small guy to get past me,” the boy with the can in his arms said. 

Steve abandoned his bag on the sidewalk and joined the other boys in a huff. The boy who asked him to join patted his back as he walked past.

The throws of the game were as exciting as any game of kick the can could be. Steve got found second, on account of him being a terrible runner, always spluttering and wheezing all over the place. 

The boy who ended up kicking the can had stylish shoes and an ironed shirt. He was one of the few that Steve didn’t recognize in the game. A cheer arrupted around the boy, a dog pile quickly following. The boy who was “it” was the only one other than Steve who hadn’t joined the noisy pile. 

The boy assessed Steve up and down and up and down. The dog pile ceased, and the rest of the boys started to figure a new game. The boy who was previously “it” snarled, not impressed by what he had seen of Steve. He had a plain face but ragged clothes; Steve had no idea if he had seen him before. 

The boy went to unite with the rest of the group. “This time, no girls,” he said, turning to look at Steve as he said it. 

Steve had to tell himself it wasn’t worth it. The last time he had fought with a boy in the neighborhood, he hadn’t been able to go to school for the next two days because of all the coughing that had come after the fight. He walked back to his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“Hey!” an unrecognizable voice called over to him. Steve turned around, surprised to see the boy who had won kick the can running over to him. “Hey,” he said, a little more friendly.

Steve nodded over to him, trying to signal for the boy to talk. The boy seemingly didn’t need any sort of signal to speak. “I don’t think I’ve ever met ya,” the boy said, striding side by side with Steve. “What’s your name?”

“Steve,” Steve stated, not trying to be inviting. This whole exchange stank of pity. 

“Stevestevesteve,” the boy said, looking uncomfortably long into Steve’s eyes. If he noticed Steve’s unfriendliness, he wasn’t letting it show on his impossibly bright face. “I’m Bucky. Mind if I walk with ya?”

“Yes,” Steve said, sidestepping a puddle left over from two days before.

Bucky just laughed.

 

From that moment on, Steve was hopeless in avoiding Bucky. And after a while, there seemed to be no reason to. Bucky appeared to be devoted to be Steve’s best friend, and there was no real reason to resist. Steve had never had a best friend before, and it honestly felt like an accomplishment that the boy everyone loved had chosen him over the masses.

It wasn’t a slow process for them to be known as solely Buckyandsteve, no spaces. Which felt good in its own sense. 

The only thing that they seemed to do apart was go to church. At first Steve thought that Buck went to a different church, maybe a different time mass. When Steve asked, Bucky didn’t really get invasive, he just got a little prissily. He always got this way around secrets.

“My mom just doesn’t want us to go to mass, is all,” Bucky lied, too steady. 

Steve didn’t care all that much about the reason why they didn’t go to mass. He frustratedly tried to draw that moment that Bucky lied for weeks, months afterward. His unskilled hand always getting the eyes and lips (and the rest of the face) wrong. 

 

For some reason, Steve was afraid of excommunication. He knew that Bucky could not understand his fear, or his general fondness for the religion at all. 

Steve knew excommunication was no life sentence, but he also wasn’t a fool enough to think that if it happened to him then he’d be accepted back to conformation with open arms. 

A woman who had lived across the hallway and three doors from the left had been excommunicated for her divorce. This was a fact revealed by her ex-husband, who she had been percuring an annulment from for years before her excommunication. 

It was irrational, Steve knew, but everytime he walked by her apartment on his way out of the building, he evaded to get close. It was as if excommunication was a sickness that he could catch. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t even this cautious when he was trying to avoid an illness. 

“What could you possibly do to get excommunicated, Steven Grant Rogers?” Sarah Rogers had said one time. Her hand that held the wooden spoon used to stir the potato soup she was preparing was resting sternly on her large hip. 

Steve had been praying to St. Sebastian as Sarah prepared dinner. 

“Honestly, son, you pray more than anyone I’ve ever met,” George Barnes had once said, his spectacled head shoved in a book that seemed to have no title. 

When Steve turned twelve, he lost his father’s rosary, shoved between his twin bed’s wood and mattress. 

 

By the time Bucky turned fifteen, leaving Steve in his lowly age of twelve by himself for three more months, Bucky had started calling everyone “bud.”

Steve hated it on impulse but refused to tell Bucky as much. It went on for years. It went on through each of Steve’s illnesses, and each of Steve’s 

They’d be lying on the floor of the Steve’s boxboard apartment, and Bucky would have an enlightening thing to say. He’d always end this illuminating quote with a flat “bud.” Mainly they were dumb enlightenments, but it still grated on Steve’s nerves that Bucky didn’t seem to be able to punctuate his sentences with anything other than the light endearment. 

“Maybe the sky is so many shades of purple at night because it’s bruised by the world,” Bucky started, his eyes obviously getting heavy. Steve had to shove his hands into his armpits to keep from reaching out to Bucky’s obvious warmth. Bucky was drifting to sleep when all of a sudden his fat mouth opened once again, “...Bud.” 

Steve could see his mother darning his socks and wincing in sympathy from the other room.

 

Steve too art classes in his free time with the last of his mother’s money at the end of every month. When she’d ask what he would do with this useless, untacile skill, Steve did not lie to her and tell her that he would make a job out of it.

He frankly became better than anyone would have ever expected, though, and when the commissions started coming through by none other than simple word of mouth, no one knew what to do except let Steve continue on with the classes. 

 

There was once a word spoken to Bucky that started with a “k” and ended with Steve’s fist.

This was the only time Bucky thanked Steve for a fight.

 

Steve finished high school on time, minus the year when he was in the single digits, the same way Bucky had before him. The night of his graduation, Bucky brought Steve to his favorite bar to buy him a shot of gin. 

He said things like “Congratulations, buddy” and “Never knew an idiot like you could finish high school.” Steve preened at ever compliment - and insult. 

Bucky didn’t try to pick up any girls that night, not to so much as look at one. It was a good night. 

 

Sarah Roger died on the fortnight before Steve’s nineteenth birthday. From that moment on it wasn’t even a question that Bucky would stay between Steve and Sarah’s apartment and his parent’s. 

At times, it seemed that Bucky was taking Sarah’s death worse than he was. At times, Steve believed that this was because Bucky was just naturally predispositioned to be the better person out of the two of them. 

Sometimes in the middle of the night for the next year after Sarah’s death, Bucky would come into Steve’s bed. It wasn’t until this happened a few times in a row that Steve realized that he was crying as he entered. 

All Steve felt that he could do was rub circles into Bucky’s back until he fell asleep.

“Shush, Buck,” Steve would say in a sleep-worn voice. “It will all be better in the morning.”

 

It was clear that Bucky loved dancing. He itched to dance the way that Steve itched for a fight, except Bucky went out dancing much more often than Steve went out fighting. He’d take the final dollars of each week and spend it on a few drinks while out. 

Usually, Steve wasn’t invited out to dance. This would have made him mad if it weren’t that Steve worked at the Pharmacy on the weekends. If it weren’t that Steve was always worried about a date that he didn’t have (and never had). If it weren’t that Steve hated dancing.

Bucky would come home at all hours, smelling of cheap liquor and sweat. Steve didn’t know what Bucky was up to in the early hours of the morning - honestly didn’t particularly care - he just hoped Bucky took care. He didn’t need any children to take care of (no less with Bucky). Maybe Bucky thought that a baby make come between him and Steve, but Steve knew that it would take a lot more for him to leave Bucky’s side. 

 

Bucky went off to war and the whole neighborhood seemed to mourn. 

Many men had been drafted before Bucky, but the grief that came with Bucky’s enlistment seemed all encompassing and painful to Steve. The neighborhood's grief seemed overwhelming. 

It seemed weird that all of Brooklyn seemed focused on only Bucky’s departure. Maybe it had been that way with every man and Steve just didn’t notice.

 

Steve tried to enlist a twelve times, each one a failure. When he was let in it felt like a Godsend. A joke of a prayer: God bless America, amen amen. 

 

Winifred Aronowitz Barnes was known solely as Winn Aronowitz in the Barnes’ neighborhood, which was not as significant as her loud mouth. In the months that Bucky was off to war, Winifred sometimes felt more like a mother to Steve than his real mother had, God rest her soul. 

When he told Winifred that he was following Bucky into the war, she was not surprised. She stood at the kitchen countertop with her hands on her perfect hips, like she had done a thousand times. Steve had never seen her do this directed towards him. 

“You two are going to die together, aren’t you?” She tutted her tongue. Steve couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. 

 

Steve saved him and he saved him and he saved him and he was fine. 

 

It was easy when Steve and Bucky were reunited to pretend that everything was exactly the same. Steve came back different. Bucky came back different.

This was easy to ignore as they shot some God fearing Nazis together.

When they were alone, they didn’t pretend either of them loved the whole war thing because they didn’t. Bucky had never wanted to be apart of any war, and now Steve was realizing that war wasn’t exactly what he expected. 

War was death. War was barely getting to paint. War was a constant source of mourning. War was what kept Bucky up every night with a new nightmare. 

 

Then Bucky died and Steve died and the whole century went and died with them.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
>  
> 
> This is very loose on the narrative. This might have an awkward transition in povs. I don't know how the second part is gonna work out because I haven't done it yet (oops).


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